Detecting God

Quite a simple question/thread really. In my discussions with believers I have yet to hear a reasonable response as to how someone (or something) would detect God.By 'detect' I mean "to discover or determine the existence, presence, or fact of".As an example, I cannot 'see' gravity but I can 'detect' it by dropping a ball and watching it hit the ground.Unless there is a reasonable answer to this question, one can only assume that God is not part of the measurable world, and therefore not part of reality and therefore not real.

Thread copied here from the Detecting God thread in the Proposed New Topics forum.

Sorry, Killinghurts, but it just happens to be the case that God cannot be physically seen or detected in any way.Of all the darned luck...

Well, I prayed, and the prayer came true! God influenced reality to make it happen! So, by my prayer coming true, I detected him!

Just use my handy patented god-detector. If it registers more than 0 gods, one could well be present.CAUTION: The godometer may also give false positives in the presence of fairies, elves, wizards, or theists who own black marker pens.

Whoa! Great Huntard!I could never get that to work. How you do that?First, I suppose, is exactly who did you prey to? Was there any vision of this God in your mind at the time? What did he/she/it look like? What position did you take? Eyes open/closed? Knees or prostrate?Details please?Do some real science here. Keep a journal. Try it again to see if you can get another positive result.BTW, what were you preying for? I hope it wasn't wasted on some namby-pamby stuff like healing a sick friend or help finding your car keys or something. A hot babe would be excellent! Was it a hot babe? Redhead?

I know! Amazing, right? You have to really have faith! To god, of course! No, I just focussed really hard on what I wanted! Eyes closed, and sitting on my couch, laid back and stuff. Notthing too straining. Well, I really wanted this bike see, a really expensive one, like 5,000 Euros. And I can't afford that, so I started praying in this laid back position on my couch with my eyes closed, focussing really hard on that bike. Then 4 months passed, and suddenly I won a bike in the lottery. Ok, it was a really crappy one worth about 500 Euros, but god must've heard my prayers about "a bike", I mean, it's hard to penetrate so many layers of aether to get to him, right, and he made me win that bike in the lottery!When you think about it, it's obvious, right! But,t here's nothing I want for myself right now! Of course not! It was about this really awesome state of the art bike! Now there's an idea! I'll try praying again, I'll report back in 4 months or so! -----Disclaimer: This is based sorta on a true story a friend of my parents told once. Yes, I laughed at it, very hard.

If you ascribe to ID then the assumption is God is detected in three ways:1. Ontologically
2. Teleologically
3. SpirituallyThe ontological argument, stripped down, essentially means that because the concept of God is so pervasive it lends credence that in fact God may exist.The teleological argument states that design and order could not randomly come about.The spiritual argument is that God must be experienced personally. That "meeting God" is subjective to the individual experience.In the final analysis there is a rebuttal for each.In my estimation, God, by the very supernature of its alleged being, cannot be verified or falsified.Each person has to make their own deduction. What can be done, to some degree, is taking specific arguments about God and testing it. It has to be specific because the concepts of God are not universal.However, if the supposition is that the bible, for instance, is the infallible Word of God, one can test many of these claims by juxtaposing it with measurable data and physical evidence.

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"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from mistaken conviction." — Blaise Pascal

non sequitur

killinghurts,I haven't been on this forum very long, but from what I've seen, it just seems to be a meeting room for atheists, as I have seen very few proponents of the Christian faith on here...but maybe I'm wrong.Anyways, You are correct that God is not part of the measurable world. However, your logical progression fails in the second part of your sentence, because no one ever said that reality only includes the measurable world.Now the most basic problem with your view of reality is that it is homo-centric (as I like to say). Since you do not believe in God, you do not view the universe in terms of God, and thus, you view it in terms of man.But from the Christian standpoint, the universe is as far from homo-centric as it can be. The universe was created by, is based on, and is for, God. We humans are not the focal point of the universe, and we only exist as a part of God's creation. The universe is held together by God, in that it would not work was God not residing over it. So, ultimately, the purpose of the universe is not so that man can enjoy himself, nor so that man can bring glory to himself, but that glory might be given to God. For the glory can be given to no one else, just like if a potter creates a fine clay vessel, people may marvel upon the vessel, but they don't praise the vessel, but rather, they praise the potter for his fine work of art.Do you have a problem with this? Does it sound like God is greedy and selfish? To you, it probably will, because your universe is homo-centric, and you care about yourself more than you do God (obviously, because you're an atheist). But myself, I would much rather live my life for someone else (God), then live my life for myself."For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things."(!!!) (Romans 1:20-23)Is this not precisely what you are doing? That is, changing God and his glory into something detectable, such as a fourfooted beast, and creeping things? If you really thought of God as God, you wouldn't even try to change His glory into something detectable, and corruptible!!Edited by sac51495, : No reason given.

You'd think, wouldn't you, that God would be at least as real as fourfooted beasts and creeping things?You wouldn't object, would you, if someone suggested that he was more powerful than an elephant or that he could see things in the dark better than an owl or that he was more intelligent than a chimpanzee. But when someone suggests that he should have a higher degree of reality than a unicorn, you behave as though the suggestion was somehow blasphemous.Really, I don't see any difference between an atheist telling me that there is no God and a theist telling me that there is a God but that he's indistinguishable from things that don't exist --- except, of course, for their choice of words.

There are a number of productive religionist voices here. Where you may be seeing a preponderance is in their stand on evolution. I hope you are not confusing evolution with atheism. Let me put words in your mouth. Feel free to spit them back out if you find them wrong.The OP is "Detecting God." This quest is looking for "evidence" in physical reality and is based on what you consider an errant world view that does not pre-suppose any god to exist. Thus it is looking in the wrong place with the wrong tools.Aren't you, also, saying that god cannot be detected, that he is undetectable, and any attempt to detect god is not only doomed to failure but is a denial of faith and thus sinful?Further, that any such "detection" is purely a subjective personal experience of the supernatural limited only to those whose world view has already pre-supposed a god by faith prior to the "detection?"

But have they given you any description of what to look for? You know it's effects and know what you're looking for. You are completely in the dark as far as god/s go. But what exactly are you describing that isn't part of the measurable world? So far you just have a word, "god," it means nothing unless you have a description that follows. And unless you get a description, you can't "look for to detect" anything.Likewise you can't claim it - whatever "it" is - isn't part of the measurable world.IMO, you can only assume that the person claiming to believe in god has no idea what it is exactly that they believe in. The too, like you, simply have a word they reference.- Oni